Playing with dolls

I hadn't heard about this ridiculous Michael Coren column about how unwomanly female soldiers are until I read about it over at Galloping Beaver. Dave and the Rev say just about everything that needs to be said about this sexist drivel.
The only additional point I want to make is this:
I've been dealing with this kind of dinosaur attitude all my life, where some men, and some women too, think it is chilvalrous and they are doing women a favour by preventing us from going into dangerous or lonely or physically demanding careers like construction workers, police officers, firemen, forestry workers, ambulance drivers, doctors, veterinarians, long-haul truckers -- or soldiers.
Consciously or unconsciously, they see women as Barbie dolls -- women aren't real people, we are just gender objects. People who think this way use words like "pretty" and "sexy" to describe young women, and words like "frumpy" and "bitchy" to describe older women -- the words don't actually describe us as individuals but only as how we look or how we relate to the men in our lives. We are really nothing but bit-players in the real world, the world where men do the real work.
The tip-off that we are dealing with another dinosaur is this: inevitably, somewhere we always find a mealy-mouthed, head-patting line about how very very special it is to be a woman because we bear the children and isn't this just the most important "job" of all!
The coda is, so just shut up about all this stupid equality stuff, and go cook something delicious like only you ladies can! And since you're in the kitchen anyway, can you iron me a shirt for tomorrow?
This attitude toward women was so ingrained in our society that many people didn't even realize they had it until they first heard the doctor riddle.
I wonder if Coren would get it even now?

Grear line of the day

Digby on the torture memos

It was bloodlust, plain and simple. They gave themselves permission to become barbarians.

And everyone from Bush and Rumsfeld and Condi and Colin Powell on down started lying about Abu Ghraib in April 2004 and have never stopped:

That we now have even more proof they consciously sent these SERE techniques to Iraq to "Gitmoize" it --- a country which we invaded under false pretenses and which had not attacked us first --- takes these crimes to yet another level. If nothing else, allowing a bunch of low level grunts to pay the price while the men and women who gave the orders publicly pretended they were appalled at the behavior they themselves had sanctioned, makes all arguments that these leaders shouldn't be held accountable completely untenable.

S & M Republicans

There's something very S & M about Republicans these days.
They spent the last eight years knuckling under to George Bush whenever Karl Rove cracked the whip. And now that Bush and Rove are gone, they're submitting to Rush Limbaugh. It's like they just can't be happy unless they're made somebody into the party dominatrix.
And come to think of it, the Conservatives under Harper aren't much better, are they? Its odd to see so many grown people enjoying being ordered around.

Just a little oopsie

RCMP "sorry" for inaccurate remarks on Dziekanski incident

Sgt. Lemaitre arrived at the police station at 6.30 a.m., was briefed by a fellow Mountie and watched a portion of a video of the incident that had been shot by a bystander.
But many details subsequently released by Sgt. Lemaitre were wrong, and the spokesman did a string of interviews in the next couple of days that repeated the errors . . .
On the witness stand, Sgt. Lemaitre insisted these erroneous statements were honest mistakes on his part. He was handed this information from a fellow Mountie, Corporal Dale Carr, the media spokesman for the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, which handles serious crime.

Hmmm, now what does this remind me of?

Shorter

Shorter Jack Layton to Stephen Harper

Please! This is supposed to be a happy occasion. Let's not bicker and argue over who killed who.

Sending a message

Just as the Wilson leak was a message to the CIA from the Bush administration that agents' careers could be ruined overnight if they were disloyal, now so the Harman expose is a message to Congress from the CIA that political careers can be ruined overnight if they start investigating what was really going on during the Bush administration.

Final exam

When you heard this news

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002.

was your first response "Oh My God!" or "Fuck, yeah"?
Putting aside the cruelty, illegality and futility of what the CIA was doing in the name of protecting America, the torture memos are also a personal test for all of us of just how civilized, humane, moral and decent we really are.

Off the record

Glenn Greenwald writes about the sycophantic practices of Washington journalist Mike Allen in letting an anonymous Bush smear-merchant trash Obama "off the record". About the same incident, Andrew Sullivan writes:

Allen is allowing a member of the administration that broke the Geneva Conventions and committed war crimes to attack the current president and claim, without any substantiation, that the torture worked. He then allows that "top official" to proclaim things that are at the very least highly questionable. What journalistic standard is Allen following in allowing such a person to speak anonymously?
And how much lower can he sink in craving buzz and traffic?

And here's another anecdote about a Washington villager who thought he could stop reporters from attributing remarks he made in a public forum to a thousand people merely by retroactively declaring his public appearance "off the record".
It reminds me of George M. Cohan's song about FDR, "Off the Record", as sung by Jimmy Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy:

Check the price tag

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has produced a very interesting report on how much we benefit from public services.
And the answer is that we each benefit to the tune of about $17,000 a year, plus or minus. This is the value of all of the public services provided to each of us by Canadian governments at the federal, provincial and municipal levels -- that's schools, hospitals, medicare, cleaning snow off the streets, and all the other stuff that governments do for people.
Poor people benefita little more, rich people a little less, but the range isn't that large.
Two of the results I found most interesting.
First, when ideologues try to pit Canadians against each other by implying that our social welfare system gives disproportionate and unfair benefits poor people or brown people or immigrants or disabled people or people with children, well, this just isn't true. Over our lifetimes, we all benefit relatively equally:

. . . seniors derive significant benefit from personal transfer payments like Old Age Security, the Guaranteed Income Supplement and the Canada/Quebec Pension Plans. As they age further, they realize increasing benefits from the health care system.
Families with young children will tend to benefit relatively more from the health care system, whereas families with older children will tend to benefit from the public education system to a greater extent than other types of families.. . .
Canadians draw remarkably similar levels of benefit from public services in the aggregate over their lifetimes, although the specific types of public services that are the source of that benefit vary over their lifetime.

So much for wedge issues.
And second, we've got to stop slobbering like Pavlov's dogs every time a politician waves a tax decrease our way.

. . . public policy debate over taxes without reference to the public services impact of tax cuts is like shopping without looking at the price tags. Just as some Canadians can afford to shop without looking at price tags, some Canadians’ incomes are high enough that they can buy into tax cuts and remain confident that their private gains will be greater than their public services losses. But the vast majority of Canadians can’t or shouldn’t shop without looking at the tags.

Strange days indeed

Somebody told me there'd be days like these.
The Indians scored 14 runs -- in the second inning!
The pitcher now has an earned run average of 34.5. He said "I'm going to keep trying to work things out in the bullpen." Yeah...

Saturday Morning Cartoon

Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century!

I wonder if Gerry Ritz will crack a few jokes?

In spite of an apparently gratuitous swipe at his federal counterpart, the Ontario Chief Medical Officer of Health clearly lays the blame for the deaths of two dozen Canadians last summer on the Canadian Food Inspection Agency:

July 16.. . two residents of a nursing home in Toronto became ill with listeriosis. One died. The listeriosis outbreak was traced to deli meats from a Maple Leaf Foods plant in Toronto. But the Canadian Food Inspection Agency did not tell health officials until Aug. 14 that meats contaminated with the listeria bacteria might also have been distributed to grocery stores and deli counters. . . The public did not become aware of the problem until Aug. 19, when the CFIA announced a broad recall of Maple Leaf products.

The CFIA report, which as the Globe reports, was also "quietly posted" today on "a government website", also contains what I think is something of a bombshell.
Buried in section 4.2 of the report, we read that Maple Leaf Foods apparently had found listeria bacteria on surfaces in the problem plant repeatedly between May and August. But they didn't tell CFIA about it until after the scandal broke.

Subsequent to the outbreak, Est. 97B {the Maple Leaf Foods plant] staff provided the CFIA with documentation that the environmental sampling program for Est. 97B had identified positive results for Listeria spp. on a number of occasions between May - August.

Now, they hadn't been finding it in the products they were testing, but they weren't actually testing very many products, only one batch a month. Maple Leaf Food's procedure, when they did find listeria on surfaces, was to clean and retest:

The MLF Directive for Environmental Listeria spp. Swab Monitoring, outlines the corrective actions to be followed when a positive result is found, including additional sanitation action and retesting to verify that the site sampled no longer had Listeria.

So when the listeria bacteria kept on showing up, why didn't anyone think there might be a problem?

Need a lift?

Watch

Thanks

Thanks very much to everyone who voted for me at the F-Word Blog awards -- I am honoured and humbled to report that I made it into the finalist round in the "Best Political blog" category. Here are the other fine blogs also in this finalist round:

Challenging the Commonplace
Womanist Musings
Alison at Creekside

And this is an extremely impressive group of bloggers.
Final voting is this weekend, April 18 and 19.
And thanks again, Alison, for nominating me.

"Party like its 1773"? Huh?

Here are some of the suggestions for protest signs from a tea party event listed on the Pajamas TV website:

Party like it's 1773
Home ownership is not an entitlement
Cut Taxes, Not Deals
Next Time, Read the Bill Before You Sign It
You Can't Borrow to Prosperity
Don't Mortgage the Future
Solve Problems, Don't Sweep Them Under the Table
220 Years to Build the Republic, 1 Month to Destroy It

Pretty incoherent and not particularly snappy -- and what the heck is "Party like its 1773" all about anyway?
"Make Love, Not War" and "No War for Oil" were a lot better, I think, but then those were for protests that actually made sense. The so-called "tea parties" are astroturfed.